He-Man: The Most Powerful Game in the Universe

If you are a child of the 80s or a fan of the cartoons from the time, you should check out He-Man – The Most Powerful Game in the Universe on the iPad. It seems to skip the recent reboot elements and focuses on the art direction from the original. The art is updated but it has the feel of the original.

Part RPG and Part side scroller, you can upgrade and purchase different power-ups to help you get He-Man through the levels. While the game over all is fun, and a better than average side scroller with some nifty little tricks they pull to keep it interesting like the background protecting you from falling items until they get hit and collapse themselves.

However the game is held back by an annoying control system. The left side of the screen is for scrolling left and right and the right part of the screen is for button mashing and jumping. It makes me long for a real game controller so I can really kick-it in the game because right now I can’t get a fine enough control to try and work my way through some of the levels like I could if I had a real controller in hand.

I tried using the ‘Fling’ and it helped a bit with the left – right movement but the jumping was out of the question, I had to remove the right stick because the jump requires more of a swipe.

As you go through the game you can collect ‘lore’ tokens that unlock different pieces of art and bio information. I was able to unlock a piece of ‘production art’ that really looks like a throw back to the 80s toy art that I fondly remember as a child.

There are 7 areas of the map to unlock (27 levels total) and currently I’m in the second stage ‘Snake Mountain’ while I work my way across Eternia towards Castle Grayskull. There is enough fun in the game that I’ll work my way across and there might be some re-play value as they have some ‘Angry Bird’ type scoring for each level and I really like the idea of getting as many stars for each level I can.

All in all if you don’t get annoyed by the controls the game is pretty fun. I’m anxious to see all the different characters and I love the style they’ve selected. Even watching the game credits has fun by having He-Man run through some of the different elements you’ll see and experience while playing the game.

He-Man: The Most Powerful Game in the Universe is $.99 and available for iOS